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The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Techhttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/10/06/the-forgotten-female-programmers-who-created-modern-tech/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/10/06/the-forgotten-female-programmers-who-created-modern-tech/#commentsMon, 06 Oct 2014 21:08:37 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=38010The Innovators, Walter Isaacson's new book, tells the stories of the people who created modern computers. Women, who are now a minority in computer science, played an outsize role in that history.]]>Jean Jennings (left) and Frances Bilas set up the ENIAC in 1946. Bilas is arranging the program settings on the Master Programmer. (Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania)

If your image of a computer programmer is a young man, there’s a good reason: It’s true. Recently, many big tech companies revealed how few of their female employees worked in programming and technical jobs. Google had some of the highest rates: 17 percent of its technical staff is female.

It wasn’t always this way. Decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming — but too often, that’s a part of history that even the smartest people don’t know.

I took a trip to ground zero for today’s computer revolution, Stanford University, and randomly asked over a dozen students if they knew who were the first computer programmers. Almost none knew.

A few students, like Cheng Dao Fan, get close. “It’s a woman, probably,” she says searching her mind for a name. “It’s not necessarily [an] electronic computer. I think it’s more like a mechanic computer.”

She’s thinking of Ada Lovelace, also known as the Countess of Lovelace, born in 1815. Walter Isaacson begins his new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, with her story.

Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of poet Lord Byron. The computer language ADA was named after her in recognition of her pioneering work with Charles Babbagge. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“Ada Lovelace is Lord Byron’s child, and her mother, Lady Byron, did not want her to turn out to be like her father, a romantic poet,” says Isaacson. So Lady Byron “had her tutored almost exclusively in mathematics as if that were an antidote to being poetic.”

Lovelace saw the poetry in math. At 17, she went to a London salon and met Charles Babbage. He showed her plans for a machine that he believed would be able to do complex mathematical calculations. He asked Lovelace to write about his work for a scholarly journal. In her article, Lovelace expresses a vision for his machine that goes beyond calculations.

She envisioned that “a computer can do anything that can be noted logically,” explains Isaacson. “Words, pictures and music, not just numbers. She understands how you take an instruction set and load it into the machine, and she even does an example, which is programming Bernoulli numbers, an incredibly complicated sequence of numbers.”

Babbage’s machine was never built. But his designs and Lovelace’s notes were read by people building the first computer a century later.

The women who would program one of the world’s earliest electronic computers, however, knew nothing of Lovelace and Babbage.

“This announcement came around that they were looking for operators of a new machine they were building called the ENIAC,” recalls Bartik. “Of course, I had no idea what it was, but I knew it wasn’t doing hand calculation.”

Bartik was one of six female mathematicians who created programs for one of the world’s first fully electronic general-purpose computers. Isaacson says the men didn’t think it was an important job.

“Men were interested in building, the hardware,” says Isaacson, “doing the circuits, figuring out the machinery. And women were very good mathematicians back then.”

Isaacson says in the 1930s female math majors were fairly common — though mostly they went off to teach. But during World War II, these skilled women signed up to help with the war effort.

“They all went out to dinner at the announcement,” she says. “We weren’t invited and there we were. People never recognized, they never acted as though we knew what we were doing. I mean, we were in a lot of pictures.”

At the time, though, media outlets didn’t name the women in the pictures. After the war, Bartik and her team went on to work on the UNIVAC, one of the first major commercial computers.

The women joined up with Grace Hopper, a tenured math professor who joined the Navy Reserve during the war. Walter Isaacson says Hopper had a breakthrough. She found a way to program computers using words rather than numbers — most notably a program language called COBOL.

“You would be using a programming language that would allow you almost to just give it instructions, almost in regular English, and it would compile it for whatever hardware it happened to be,” explains Isaacson. “So that made programming more important than the hardware, ’cause you could use it on any piece of hardware.”

Hopper retired from the Navy Reserve as a rear admiral. An act of Congress allowed her to stay past mandatory retirement age. She did become something of a public figure and even appeared on the David Letterman show in 1986. Letterman asks her, “You’re known as the Queen of Software. Is that right?”

“More or less,” says the 79-year-old Hopper.

But it was also just about this time that the number of women majoring in computer science began to drop, from close to 40 percent to around 17 percent now. There are a lot of theories about why this is so. It was around this time that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were appearing in the media; personal computers were taking off.

Computer science degrees got more popular, and boys who had been tinkering with computer hardware at home looked like better candidates to computer science departments than girls who liked math, says Janet Abbate, a professor at Virginia Tech who has studied this topic.

“It’s kind of the classic thing,” she says. “You pick people who look like what you think a computer person is, which is probably a teenage boy that was in the computer club in high school.”

For decades the women who pioneered the computer revolution were often overlooked, but not in Isaacson’s book about the history of the digital revolution.

“When they have been written out of the history, you don’t have great role models,” says Isaacson. “But when you learn about the women who programmed ENIAC or Grace Hopper or Ada Lovelace … it happened to my daughter. She read about all these people when she was in high school, and she became a math and computer science geek.”

Lovelace, the mathematician, died when she was 36. The women who worked on the ENIAC have all passed away, as has Grace Hopper. But every time you write on a computer, play a music file or add up a number with your phone’s calculator, you are using tools that might not exist without the work of these women.

Isaacson’s book reminds us of that fact. And perhaps knowing that history will show a new generation of women that programming is for girls.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/10/06/the-forgotten-female-programmers-who-created-modern-tech/feed/4Jean Jennings (left) and Frances Bilas set up the ENIAC in 1946. Bilas is arranging the program settings on the Master Programmer.Jean Jennings (left) and Frances Bilas set up the ENIAC in 1946. Bilas is arranging the program settings on the Master Programmer. (Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania)Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of poet Lord Byron. The computer language ADA was named after her in recognition of her pioneering work with Charles Babbage.Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of poet Lord Byron. The computer language ADA was named after her in recognition of her pioneering work with Charles Babbagge. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)Grace Hopper originated electronic computer automatic programming for the Remington Rand Division of Sperry Rand Corp.Grace Hopper originated electronic computer automatic programming for the Remington Rand Division of Sperry Rand Corp. (AP)Ada Lovelace Day Celebrates Women in STEMhttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/10/06/ada-lovelace-day-celebrates-women-in-stem/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/10/06/ada-lovelace-day-celebrates-women-in-stem/#commentsThu, 06 Oct 2011 21:16:33 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=15831Continue reading Ada Lovelace Day Celebrates Women in STEM→]]>

Tomorrow, October 7 is Ada Lovelace Day, to commemorate the work of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

For those who want to participate, there are a couple of options. You can blog about a woman in the STEM field who has inspired you to become what you are today. You can participate in events in your area that celebrate women in technology. And you can take the time to learn about the contributions that women have made to the field.

Many have never heard of Ada Lovelace, even though she’s credited with writing the first computer program.

The stereotypes about women in science and technology persist that it’s “men’s work.” And indeed, in some respects that has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Women are still disproportionately underrepresented in STEM majors at school and in STEM careers:

Women hold 56% of all professional occupations in the U.S. workforce, but only 25% of IT occupations. Only 11% of executives at Fortune 500 tech companies are women.

In 2009, just 18% of undergraduate Computing and Information Sciences degrees were awarded to women; in 1985, women earned 37% of these degrees (via NCWIT)

But it’s crucial to “change the ratio” and to encourage more girls and women to pursue STEM education and careers. (One encouraging sign was last year’s Google Science Fair, whose top prizes went to American girls.) Part how to do this involves being able to point to female role models and acknowledge their contributions to the field.

That’s why an act as simple as blogging on Ada Lovelace Day is important. As it stands, many people cannot name a single female scientist or engineer or mathematician. (Or, if they can name one, it’s Marie Curie.) Indeed, many have never heard of Ada Lovelace, even though she’s credited with writing the first computer program.

If you haven’t heard of her, here’s some background.

Born in 1815, Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, although he had no relationship with her and died when she was only nine. Ada pursued her interests in mathematics, studying with some of the best-known mathematicians of her time. In 1833, she was introduced to Charles Babbage, with whom she worked and corresponded about his early computing machines. She also translated the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s proposed machine, the Analytical Engine, and in doing so added her own notes to the translation. These notes included an algorithm designed to be processed by the machine — the first computer program.

Ada Lovelace Day aims to help correct the ways in which women’s contributions to science and technology are overlooked. If you’re looking for inspirational women to highlight, the Geek Feminism blog has a wiki about women in science and in computer science. We’d love to hear about the women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics who’ve inspired you.